Recently, and finally, America has realized that what you learn before you start school casts the dye for  your whole life, and how you approach the world around you. Your cultural intelligence is set by age nine, and, if your experiences at home, family, and school were not the best, by the time you reach high school, your views of your life and environment have become difficult to change. The key to Human Ecology education is to give people all the information and help they need, early on, so they can understand how to make informed decisions and manage their lives. That management task scales up for everyone as students mature and face more complex social systems and more intricate and often biased interactions at home and at work. Human Ecology is understanding the relationship between you and the natural, social, and built environments of life.

 

Signs of human failure are all around us now, food insecurity, more homeless people, shortened lifespans, youth suicides, bankruptcies, chronic poor health, obesity and more. They are all related, and are the fallout of the missing education to understand, navigate, and plan a healthy life. The mistaken assumption has been that professional education will solve the problem. That thinking has made career prep a priority in schools for decades; yet human failures grow. We have learned, unfortunately, that it is not all about money, and careers can change fast or disappear. Human problems have become more acute as social and natural environments change too rapidly and become too complex for too many people, including children, to understand and adapt, yet it is too late once they are adults; the damage is done. This social decline is why Human Ecology programs have now become the critical missing element in most schools. Empowering people with the life knowledge and skills prevents the decisions that lead to human failure and enable young people to anticipate and participate in change as it occurs in their lives.

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It takes fifteen years, K-14.